by Jenny Colgan
‘I do love Stokey,’ reflected Austin, later. ‘Though you know what? Maybe home is just wherever you and Darny are.’
And he kissed her hard, beneath the glowing branches of the little, stunted pear tree, already dreaming of spring.
Baking your first cupcake
by The Caked Crusader
So, you’ve read this fab novel and, apart from thinking, gosh, I want to read all of Jenny Colgan’s other novels, you’re also thinking, I want to bake my own cupcakes. Congratulations! You are setting out on a journey that will result in pleasure and great cake!
Firstly, I’ll let you into a little secret that no cupcake bakery would want me to share: making cupcakes is easy, quick and cheap. You will create cupcakes in your own home – even on your first attempt, I promise – that taste better and look better than commercially produced cakes.
The great thing about making cupcakes is how little equipment they require. Chances are you already have a cupcake tin (the tray with twelve cavities) knocking about in your kitchen cupboards. It’s the same pan you use for making Yorkshire puds and, even if you don’t have one, they can be picked up for under £5 in your supermarket’s kitchenware aisle. The only other thing to buy before you can get started is a pack of paper cases, which, again, any supermarket sells in the home baking aisle.
Before we delve into the workings of a vanilla cupcake recipe, it’s important to absorb what I think of as the four key principles of baking (this makes them sound rather grander than they are!):
– Bring the ingredients (particularly the butter) to room temperature before you start. Not only will this create the best cupcake but also it’s so much easier for you to work with the ingredients … and why wouldn’t you want to make it easy on yourself?
– Preheat your oven i.e. switch it on to the right temperature setting about 20–30 minutes before the cakes go into the oven. This means that the cake batter receives the correct temperature straight away and all the chemical processes will commence, thus producing a light sponge. Thankfully, in order to bake a great cupcake, you don’t need to know what all those chemical processes are!
– Weigh your ingredients on a scale and make sure you don’t miss anything out. Baking isn’t like any other form of cooking – you can’t guess the measurements or make substitutions and expect success. If you’re making a casserole that requires two carrots and you decide to put in three, chances are it will be just as lovely (although perhaps a touch more carroty); if your cake recipe requires, for example, two eggs and you put in three, what would have been an airy fluffy sponge will come out like eggy dough. This may sound restrictive but actually, it’s great – all the thinking is done for you in the recipe, yet you’ll get all the credit for baking a delicious cupcake.
– Use good-quality ingredients. If you put butter on your bread, why would you put margarine in a cake? If you eat nice chocolate, why would you use cooking chocolate in a cake? A cake can only be as nice as the ingredients going into it.
Here is my failsafe recipe for vanilla sponge cupcakes with vanilla buttercream. It will make 12 cupcakes.
Ingredients:
For the cupcakes:
125g unsalted butter, at room temperature
125g caster sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature
125g self-raising flour, sifted i.e. passed through a sieve
2 tsp vanilla extract (N.B. ‘extract’, not ‘essence’. Extract is natural whereas essence contains chemicals and is nasty)
2 tbsp milk (you can use whole milk or semi-skimmed but not skimmed, as it tastes horrible)
For the buttercream:
125g unsalted butter, at room temperature
250g icing sugar, sifted i.e. passed through a sieve
1 tsp vanilla extract
Splash of milk – by which I mean, start with a tablespoon, beat that in, see if the buttercream is the texture you want, if it isn’t add a further tablespoon etc
How to make:
Preheat the oven to 190°C/fan oven 170°C/gas mark 5.
Line a cupcake pan with paper cases. This recipe will make 12 cupcakes.
Beat the butter and sugar together until they are smooth, fluffy and pale. This will take several minutes even with soft butter. Don’t skimp on this stage, as this is where you get air into the mix. How you choose to beat the ingredients is up to you. When I started baking I used a wooden spoon, then I got handheld electric beaters and now I use a stand mixer. They will all yield the same result, however, if you use the wooden spoon, you will get a rather splendid upper arm workout … who said cake was unhealthy?
Add the eggs, flour, vanilla and milk and beat until smooth. Some recipes require you to add all these ingredients separately but, for this recipe, you don’t have to worry about that. You are looking for what’s called ‘dropping consistency’; this means that when you take a spoonful of mixture and gently tap the spoon, the mixture will drop off. If the mixture doesn’t drop off the spoon, mix it some more. If it still won’t drop, add a further tablespoon of milk.
Spoon into the paper cases. There is no need to level the batter, as the heat of the oven will do this for you. Place the tray in the upper half of the oven. Do not open the oven door until the cakes have baked for twelve minutes, then check them by inserting a skewer (if you don’t have one, use a wooden cocktail stick) into the centre of the sponges – if it comes out clean, the cakes are ready and you can remove them from the oven. If raw batter comes out on the skewer, pop them back in the oven and give them a couple more minutes. Cupcakes, being small, can switch from underdone to overdone quickly so don’t get distracted! Don’t worry if your cakes take longer than a recipe states – ovens vary.
As soon as the cupcakes come out of the oven, tip them out of the tin on to a wire rack. If you leave them in the tin they will carry on cooking (the tin is very hot) and the paper case may start to pull away from the sponge, which looks ugly. Once on the wire rack they will cool quickly – about thirty minutes.
Now make the buttercream: beat the butter in a bowl, on its own, until very soft. It will start to look almost like whipped cream. It is this stage in the process that makes your buttercream light and delicious.
Add the icing sugar and beat until light and fluffy. Go gently at first otherwise the icing sugar will cloud up and coat you and your kitchen with white dust! Keep mixing until the butter and sugar are combined and smooth; the best test for this is to place a small amount of the icing on your tongue and press it up against the roof of your mouth. If it feels gritty, it needs more beating. If it’s smooth, you can move on to the next step.
Beat in the vanilla and milk. If the buttercream isn’t as soft as you would like, then add a tiny bit more milk but be careful – you don’t want to make the buttercream sloppy.
Either spread or pipe over the cupcakes. Spreading is easier and requires no additional equipment. However, if you want your cupcakes to look fancy it might be worth buying an icing bag and star-shaped nozzle. You can get disposable icing bags, which cut down on washing-up.
Add any additional decoration you desire – this is where you can be creative. In the past I have used sugar flowers, hundreds and thousands, maltesers, edible glitter, sprinkles, nuts, crumbled Flake … the options are endless.
Bask in glory at the wonderful thing you have made.
Eat.
Me and the 1981
Royal Wedding
I was nine years old in 1981, for what I like to call the real royal wedding – the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. It really was an optimal time for frothy-dress-based princessy excitement (that was then, of course. I realise that these days, according to the tabloids, all nine-year-olds have tattoos and drink Bacardi Breezers and things, but those were more innocent times).
Me, Alison Woodall and Judi Taylor thought that it was all absolutely fantastic, and managed to refine our dress-designing skills to the point where I could still draw that dress now – ruffly sleeves
; bow in the middle; too-short flicky hair – with my eyes shut.
I watched the entire thing (TV in the morning was a novelty then), even that incredibly long boring bit where they all went in for the wedding breakfast, which seemed utterly tedious to me. It turned out I was right about this: unless you’re sat next to people you like, wedding dinners can be incredibly dull. Can you imagine what it must have been like if you’d been sat next to e.g. the Dowager Duchess of Chessingham?
Despite growing up in a nominally republican part of the world (the Catholic West Coast of Scotland), we still had a street party, and I have a clear memory of saying to my mother, ‘God would have lost a lot of believers if it hadn’t been a sunny day today, wouldn’t he?’ (it was), to which my mother replied, ‘hmmm,’ (I was a terribly priggish child).
In fact, a friend of mine who married very young in her last year of college, actually managed to be part of that generation, familiar from all eighties snapshots; she was among the last to get married in a Diana-style dress, including the enormous puffed sleeves with the lace and the bows. Apart from the fact that she, like Diana, looks like a tiny child buried in a pile of lacy laundry, it is slightly gorgeous.
When we were passing through Las Vegas about four years ago, my husband and I decided to renew our vows with Elvis (as you do). He and my eldest son wore matching white tuxedos. I dealt with my pent-up royal wedding issues by wearing the hugest, widest, most enormous, flower-festooned frock I could hire. It went on for miles. It got caught in lifts. It was great. In fact, I think I secretly preferred it to my very stylish, expensive, subtle, Grace Kelly-esque wedding dress I got married in the first time around. It was brilliant.
For all the sadness and tragedy that followed – and it is almost impossible to now look at the famous pic of the laughing Diana, collapsing in that huge meringue surrounded by her little bridesmaids, without feeling melancholic – it was a huge jolly occasion, and it is only the most churlish, I think, who wouldn’t wish all the very best now to her son, and someone who seems like a perfectly nice girl.
If nothing else, it’s lovely to have a little day of national celebration and an excuse for a street party. And some cake, of course! My daughter is only one, so not quite old enough to get caught up in wedding dress fever alas, and chances are Kate will go for something very low-key and stylish anyway (she does seem like that kind of person), which, I think, is a bit of a shame for budding nine-year-old wedding dress designers everywhere. But hopefully having a slightly more mature princess, who knows what she wants, will bode very well for their years ahead.
And, to be the total opposite of that, look at the next page for some great big, indulgent, frothy cupcakes. To get a proper frou-frou icing, use a bag or an icing kit and start from the centre, making a snail shape, then building the icing up as high as you can!
Royal Wedding Street Party
Red, White and Blue Cupcakes
Measurements: Imperial, of course!
White Queen Victoria sponge base:
6oz butter
6oz caster sugar
3 eggs (organic, of course)
6oz self-raising flour
splash of milk
1 tsp vanilla
To make: cream the butter and sugar until it’s light and fluffy. Add the eggs with a spoon of flour if it looks like it’s curdling, then fold in the rest of the flour. Add a splash of milk until the mixture is dropping consistency. Fill twelve cupcake cases two thirds of the way, then bake at 180° C for 12–15 minutes.
Red cream cheese topping
8oz cream cheese
5 tbsp butter
8oz icing sugar (or to taste)
add a few drops of rosewater and some food colouring
To make: whizz everything up. Decorate with blue sugar flowers. Scoff and toast the happy couple!
WEST END GIRLS
Jenny Colgan
The streets of London are paved with gold … allegedly.
They may be twin sisters, but Lizzie and Penny Berry are complete opposites – Penny is blonde, thin and outrageous; Lizzie quiet, thoughtful and definitely not thin. The one trait they do share is a desire to DO something with their lives and, as far as they’re concerned, the place to get noticed is London.
Out of the blue they discover they have a grandmother living in Chelsea – and when she has to go into hospital, they find themselves flat-sitting on the King’s Road. But, as they discover, it’s not as easy to become It Girls as they’d imagined, and West End Boys aren’t at all like Hugh Grant …
‘A brilliant novel from the mistress of chick-lit’
Eve
978-0-7515-4332-2
OPERATION SUNSHINE
Jenny Colgan
Evie needs a good holiday. Not just because she’s been working all hours in her job, but also because every holiday she has ever been on has involved sunburn, arguments and projectile vomiting – sometimes all three at once. Why can’t she have a normal holiday, like other people seem to have – some sun, sand, sea and (hopefully) sex?
So when her employers invite her to attend a conference with them in the South of France, she can’t believe her luck. It’s certainly going to be the holiday of a lifetime – but not quite in the way Evie imagines!
‘Colgan at her warm, down-to-earth best’
Cosmopolitan
978-0-7515-3762-8
DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND
Jenny Colgan
Sophie Chesterton has been living the high life of glamorous parties, men and new clothes, never thinking about tomorrow. But after one shocking evening, she comes back down to earth with the cruellest of bumps. Facing up to life in the real world for the first time, Sophie quickly realises that when you’ve hit rock bottom, the only way is up.
Join her as she starts life all over again: from cleaning toilets for a living to the joys of bring-your-own-booze parties; from squeezing out that last piece of lip gloss from the tube to bargaining with bus drivers.
For anyone who’s ever been scared of losing it all, this book is here to show you money can’t buy you love, and best friends are so much more fun than diamonds …
‘Jenny Colgan always writes an unputdownable, page-turning bestseller – she’s the queen of modern chick-lit’
Louise Bagshawe
978-0-7515-4031-4
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND
THE DUMPED
Jenny Colgan
Now, you obviously, would never, ever look up your exes on Facebook. Nooo. And even if you did, you most certainly wouldn’t run off trying to track them down, risking your job, family and happiness in the process. Posy Fairweather, on the other hand …
Posy is delighted when Matt proposes - on top of a mountain, in a gale, in full-on romantic mode. But a few days later disaster strikes: he backs out of the engagement. Crushed and humiliated, Posy starts thinking. Why has her love life always ended in total disaster? Determined to discover how she got to this point, Posy resolves to get online and track down her exes. Can she learn from past mistakes? And what if she has let Mr Right slip through her fingers on the way?
‘A Jenny Colgan novel is as essential for a week in the sun as Alka Seltzer, aftersun and far too many pairs of sandals’
Heat
978-0-7515-4030-7
* Oh, come on. I am right about this. Beetroot is total horse food. One of the worst sentences I’ve ever heard was after arriving back tired from a trip away, only to be greeted by my other half keenly announcing, ‘You know how you don’t like beetroot? Well, I reckon you’re going to like it my new way.’ I swear, I nearly cried.
Table of Contents
Praise for Jenny Colgan
Also by Jenny Colgan
Copyright
Acknowledgements
A Word From Jenny
Author’s Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
; Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
Baking your first cupcake by The Caked Crusader
Me and the 1981 Royal Wedding
Royal Wedding Street Party Red, White and Blue Cupcakes
West End Girls
Operation Sunshine
Diamonds are A Girl’s Best Friend
The Good, The Bad And The Dumped